The devil is a liar

This last Sunday was the feast day of St. Michael and all angels.  Good so far.  And as pastor Gust pointed out, even the people you know who have no time for Christ and him crucified will still have a nice chat with you about angels.  Because angels are nice, they're fun, and they're some of the more esoteric, mythological aspects of the Christian faith.  Angels are just mysterious to be fun, and the fact that they aren't spoken of that often in Christian worship services, it makes them seem even more mysterious.  Something inscrutable, something that cannot be known much about, yet are still an absolute part of the Christian faith.  You can't have the Christian faith without them, and they seem to show up at extremely important times.  They show up at the annunciation, at the garden of Gethsemane, at Passover and in the fiery furnace.  In fact, a lot of these are really really well known stories from the scriptures, and given that these are central to the story of salvation, you can't really excise angels from the faith.

So we must have angels, well and good.  But what do we do with them? Well, you're a Lutheran, right? And if you're a Lutheran, then you get to do what very few people get to do overall, which is to rely on the scriptures alone.  And if you rely on the scriptures alone, then you will be told what you need to know about the angels.  There are two angels spoken of by name in the Bible, they are named Michael and Gabriel.  And once you get these guys worked out, then you'll know what the angels are all about, and what they're up to.  I'll explain.

We will talk about Michael first, because it is his day.  St. Michael is the warrior of God.  He is the commander of the hosts of angels, the soldier, the mighty arm of the Lord.  When parts of the liturgy call God the "Lord of Sabaoth," it is referring to him as the God of the hosts of angels.  And Michael is right at the top of that.  Michael is the apex warrior in the armies of the Lord.  If the Archangel Michael is a brave soldier or fighter, though, who is he here to fight? And that is a very important question.  The presence of police admits the possibility of crime.  The presence of an army admits the existence of a rival army.  And the presence of a warrior angel represents the presence of rival spiritual forces.  You know what those rivals are, though, don't you.  You know that the devil and all of his angels who were thrown down from heaven, they represent a very real and present threat to you and to your wellbeing.  And this is where things get interesting.

If you have an warrior on your behalf, someone who is going to fight to protect you, then you have to understand what that person is trying to protect you from, and to understand what kind of adversary you are facing.  For most of us, we tend to figure that the devil is one of two things: either made up, irrelevant, a fable, or a roaring lion, prowling around, seeking who he may devour.  There is not a lot of middle ground, not really.  But the way the devil is described in the scriptures is a little different.  He does show up as a roaring lion as well, obviously.  But the way he shows up in our readings from this last weekend is wonderfully interesting.  He is described as the great deceiver of the world.  And that's fascinating.

And you don't know that you're being deceived while you're being deceived.  Nobody can tell that they are being deceived. You can tell if someone is trying to deceive you, for sure, but you have no idea if you are actually being deceived.  That's how deception works.  And when you are being deceived, there's a good chance that you're going to advocate for your deceiver. They seem like your friends, you know.  They always seem like your friends while they are deceiving you.  Manipulation works like that.  You'll always be advocating on behalf of someone seeking your destruction as long as they seem like they're on your side.  And if you believe them, then you'll make it borderline impossible for the police, the army, whatever authorities there are to fight that person.

So we, as Christians, tend to suffer from a sort of spiritual stockhom syndrome.  That is, we identify with, and defend our captor, our deceiver.  The one who is handing us everything that we say we want, the one who is giving us everything that we say we crave, which works against us, that's the one that we will fight to defend.  It's a lot like that bad news friend that you had as a child, the one that your parents didn't want you to hang out with. Your parents said that he was bad news, and they wanted to keep you away from his influences.  They were bad influences, but back in the day, what you wanted more than anything else was to defend that person against what your parents wanted.  Even if that friend was no good for you, even if you recognize them as bad for you now, at the time, you would have defended them to the moon and back. Even if they were using you.  Especially if they were using you.

People who want something from you are master manipulators.  They will turn you away from your friends, family and community.  They will drag you down until you identify with them only, even if they are harming you by doing it. Like it or not, this is a feature of being manipulated, of being deceived, and we tend to fall for it.  If you're going to fall for it in the world of flesh, why do you think you're immune from it in the world of the spirit? Think about the way that the devil first broke through human resistance - not by threats, not by outright war, but through deception.  When Eve assesses the situation after the fact (post-mortem, but also, hilariously, pre-mortem), she says 'the serpent beguiled me, and I did eat.'  Yes, indeed.  Deception, all the way along.  And if he worked that way then, why do you think he would change his tactics now? If anything, they work better than before, because you are easier to deceive, to beguile, than anyone ever has been.  This is the case because you are willing to believe absolutely anything.  You don't know God's word the way you should, so you're essentially ready to believe anything.

So Michael has his work cut out for him.  Even if he could take the shot, you're too busy advocating on behalf of the devil, showing sympathy for the devil, to let him.  If you want to resist the devil and have him flee from you, how are you going to do that? Well, you have to know what you are fighting.  And the only way to know that....is to get in touch with the other angel.  For you see, Michael and Gabriel work together, you know.  The word of God and the sword of God, they work in tandem to protect you.  For God is wise enough to know that you are tempted to follow the seductive voice of the devil.  He knows how easy you are to deceive, how you will follow the voice that seems good to you.  You'll follow the one that promises you the most.  But the reason that you were given the scriptures, and told to follow them completely, is so that the deception that the devil brings to you can be blasted through.  If you want a fun exercise, do a quick word search in your concordance for the words 'deceived' or 'deceive.'  In there, you will find all the tricks that the devil uses to deceive the people of God.  You will find all the times in which the devil thinks he can take advantage of you, where he can play to your pride or to your arrogance.  You will find him working subtly to trip you up, which will work as long as you are still advocating for him and his voice.  But if you resist him, he will flee from you.  To resist him, you have to know what it is you are fighting against.  And if you know what you are fighting against, then you will ask for help from the Lord your God to fight against him.  And that's where Michael comes in.

The word of God and the sword of God work together perfectly.  They work as a team, designed to bring you out of the clutches of an enemy that likely, you forgot you even had.  The devil is a liar, he is a deceiver, and he will work as hard as he can to make you believe that he is on your side, and all his suggestions are things you should very much like to do.  He practices to deceive, and you'll believe it all until someone reminds you very assertively that you are being deceived.  Until someone confronts you with the truth.  And that's why you need the word of God to identify the problem, and the sword of God to remove it.  Michael is happy to put the devil to flight, delighted even.  But you have to stop fighting and preventing him from doing so.  So when you find all those passages in the Bible that talk about being deceived, realize that these are ways in which you are being deceived.  And God wants to help you with these issues, with these hangups and problems.  And the first step, as it always is, is admitting that you do, in fact, have a problem.  Very few of us know what our problems actually are, which is why the scriptures go to as much length as they do to indicate how you are being deceived. 

The Bible tells you what you have done wrong, tells you how you have overstepped, and tells you how far you are from what you ought to be doing.  The bigger issue, though, is what you do with the fact that you have been deceived.  Most people won't readily admit that they have been wrong, and will essentially perpetually double down on their deceit.  That is, they will almost always insist that they were right the whole time, even though they were wrong, and just continued being wrong forever.  But the forgiveness that you are promised means that you can actually admit that you have been deceived.  You can admit that someone lied to you, and you believed it.  But thanks to Christ, you don't have to pretend that you were right the whole time.  As CS Lewis would say, sometimes the person who gets the furthest ahead is the person who turns back first.